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Comment: Re:Is the end goal of life a high salary? (Score 1) 365

by dj245 (#43765815) Attached to: Bloomberg To HS Grads: Be a Plumber

Is the end goal of life a high salary?

I understand his advice, if followed, and if you work your way, either through trade school or apprenticeship, to journeyman, and then to master, you can expect a $80K+ a year income.

Is this the end-all, be-all of human existence?

A high salary is not why I went into the sciences - I went in with a passion for knowledge and knowing how things work, and why, and how to build things that, because they were barely within the boundaries of the rules, did amazing and astonishing things. A high salary resulted because I was successful at pursuing this passion.

I would instead advise people to try to find three things for which they feel passion, and are good at, and then find someone willing to pay you to do one of them.

If you can only find one thing for which you have passion, if you can still find someone to pay you to do it, then you are ahead of the game, compared to what Bloomberg suggest, if it happens that none of your objects of passion include plumbing.

There are plenty of people who look at the top end paychecks available in a profession, and choose a profession on that basis. Those who do will never reach the top end of that pay range if they do not posses a passion for the profession; they will always be middle tier, and they will watch the clock until it is time to check out from their job, and "get back to their 'real' life". This is where a lot of unemployed IT "professionals" come from.

For those clock watching 8 hours of their day, they will be miserable, working at something for which they have no passion, having intentionally turned their soul off for those eight hours in exchange for money. They will sell half their waking life into misery to benefit the other half of their waking life. And at the end of the day in their "real life", they will find they can not take joy in their "real life", as they anticipate, after sleeping, returning to their job for the next 8 soulless hours of work.

Do something you love, and for which you have passion; reclaim your soul for those lost 8 hours of your life.

I have done different things in my career, some of which interests me, and some which did not. Doing "something I love" has not really helped me live a pleasant life and sleep well at night. The main drivers for me are more like:

1. Job is important and has an impact on someone or some thing. There is a purpose which makes me feel needed.
2. Job has progress milestones which are achievable with some work. A job with no noticeable progress is miserable monotony. Likewise, a job with unachievable goals is frustrating.
3. Job has the right mix of travel, hands-on work, desk work, etc for ME.
4. Boss who is fair, sets clear expectations, and is interested in having a "rising tide lift all boats".
5. Being financially secure. This includes good health insurance. I sleep a lot better at night now that my income is significantly more than my needs. I can worry about the things that matter and not the fluctuations in my bank account.

The first 4 have been proven over and over in psychology studies to make people happier. Doing "something you love" means that I make my hobbies into a job. It is a good way to become sick of both and then be miserable.

Comment: Re:Marine Engineering Degree != Marine Engineer (Score 1) 365

by dj245 (#43765755) Attached to: Bloomberg To HS Grads: Be a Plumber

I teach engineering at a maritime academy and it dazzles me that so many students pay through the nose and suffer through 4+ years of regimented academics for a license that they could get by just sailing as a paid vessel assistant for a few years after high school and taking a Coast Guard examination. This is a practice called hawsepiping and used to be the norm for the profession. Marine engineers are really (for the most part) mechanics, and much simpler vocational school would be more than adequate for these jobs. Admittedly the students also get a "marine engineering degree" over and above the training for the license that is transferrable to a lot of shore-side professions, but most of that is lost on the students. All they care about is getting the license and many whine and cry about having to read, write, do math, and take engineering coursework. I do think that degree is worth what they pay, but it really a form of insurance so they can remain employed after they come ashore, and getting 20 year old boys who aspire to be sailors to think about what they are going to do later in life (hell, later in the *day*) is hard.

Better tighten that onion on your belt. Meeting the STCW-95 requirements would be really tough without a dedicated educational/hand-on program. Working your way up from AB or wiper is for masochists. It could be done, but it is a far harder path for the same result. It is a throwback to the time when people had careers and pensions. Now people have jobs and need to change companies frequently. The marine industry is no different than any other industry today- no company wants to pay to train anybody, they want to hire someone who has all the certifications and experience already, and they don't want to pay a dime more than they have to in salary.

I do think that the standard 3rd mate/3rd engineer track could be shortened to 3 or even 2 years, but at that point it becomes Training rather than an Education (and as an instructor, you should appreciate the difference). In-state Maritime Academy is one of the best purchases I ever made. It is truly a bargain when you look at all the idiots spending $40k a year to become English majors.

I really disagree with your statement that " Admittedly the students also get a "marine engineering degree" over and above the training for the license that is transferrable to a lot of shore-side professions, but most of that is lost on the students. All they care about is getting the license...". It wasn't that long ago that I was in school. 2/3 of my classmates wanted to graduate, get their license, start jobs, and get on with their lives. The license is just a tool for them to get there. Only about half of my license-bearing classmates were still shipping out after 5 years. Everybody knows that shipping out is a marriage-killer and a poor way to raise kids. The degree is not a fallback plan if the license doesn't pan out for some reason. The coast guard license opens only a handful of doors (albeit important ones). The degree is a piece of paper that opens many kinds of doors.

Comment: Re:I believe I speak for a dozen people when I say (Score 1) 163

by dj245 (#43759561) Attached to: Amtrak Upgrades Wi-Fi

If its picking you up in Lakewood or making other stops on the way, it's not the "high speed" you're thinking of.

The population of Lakewood is over 140,000 people. Not enourmous, but worth stopping at.

I have been on the bullet trains in Japan, and the non-super-express ones stop at some fairly small stations. The key is that their trains are electrified, which allows for very fast acceleration. They also stop only long enough to let people on and off- 1 minute or less. When they changed from the 500 series to the N700 series, the acceleration was improved by about 80%. Even though the N700 has a lower top speed, it is faster to get to the destination because of the fast acceleration.

Comment: Re:Rather obvious isn't it? (Score 1) 333

by dj245 (#43712231) Attached to: Last Forking Warning For Bitcoin

With 21million BTCs dividable into 100million satoshis each I think the world will have plenty of artificial bits to spread around.

Really?

There are about 1.18 trillion paper/coin USD in circulation. Let's estimate that 60-75% is held outside the US nowadays (this is a difficult number to calculate so it is basically an educated guess). There are about 350 million people in the US, so we have roughly (1.18 trillion *100*0.4) / 350million or 135,000 physical currency units per person ($1350.00). This seems low, but this represents physical currency, not money in bank accounts.

Now compare to bitcoin. If we assume 1 billion ("the world will have plenty") people use it, then we have (21 million * 100 million) /1 billion or 2,100,000 currency units (Satoshi) per person.

But wait, shouldn't we compare apples to apples? Let's include ALL USD, including all USD that are electronic. That's the M2 indicator, which is currently around $10trillion. If we assume that 1 billion people all over the world are sharing USD currency, that comes out to 1,000,000 currency units per person. So the Satoshi has only about double the curency units per person (assuming 1 billion people) that the USD has. BUT the US creates more money, and Bitcoin "loses" money over time (it is deleted, forgotten, hard drive crash, etc).

Bitcoin as it currently stands is the IPv4 of currency. If it becomes popular, I can easily imagine not having enough divisible units to go around.

Comment: Re:An Extremely Decent video on the subject (Score 1) 134

by dj245 (#43710457) Attached to: How Facebook Ruined Comments (at Least For One Writer)

The clip is great. Here's what I don't get: WHY do people keep using that shit, when so many seem to hate it so much?

I hate broccoli. You know what? I don't eat it every day and then bitch about how horrible it is. Why would anyone keep using a service that they seem to dislike as much as they do?

Are they insane, or masochists, or what? I mean, it isn't like people were talking with other people, keeping up to date, and planning things to do together with friends, on the internet for decades before FB came along, or anything... Or is it that they believe they need a for-profit data-harvester in the middle, in order to talk to people?

Seriously, WTF?

O

Back in the day, everybody hated AT&T too. They were a monopoly, they charged too much, never innovated, etc etc. They were still a more convenient option for communicating compared to USPS so people used them anyway.

Comment: Re:You know who else had things ruined? (Score 1) 134

by dj245 (#43710405) Attached to: How Facebook Ruined Comments (at Least For One Writer)

Do you want us to police the world or not?

Not. Please.

Seriously, do you and other people in the US really think they're the world's police, the last bastion for freedom, etc? Is this a common mentality?

Regardless of what Americans think, there is no other superpower who wants or tries to be the world's police. So other countries expect the US to be the world's police. Just look at all the pressure we are getting on Syria.

As for myself, I don't think we should do serious intervening, even in Syria. But I do think that we could quietly put our thumb on the scale and tilt it one way or another. The war needs to end- hundreds of thousands of refugees are fleeing across the border to western-friendly Turkey, our BFF Jordan, and already-unstable Egypt. Turkey is not a particularly rich country, but at least it is decently large. Jordan is not a rich country and is quite small. Egypt is kind of a basket case right now. If any of them crack under the strain of all these poor and jobless immigrants, nothing good will come of it. The biggest risk here is not terrorists, it is the crippling economic burden of millions of refugees. Having 1 failed state in the region is bad enough. We don't need a handful of lawless regions.

Comment: Re:"UN Says: Why Not Eat More Insects?" (Score 1) 623

by dj245 (#43710091) Attached to: UN Says: Why Not Eat More Insects?

Pretty much this.

I'll eat pretty much anything. I've had Japanese colleagues play "take the gaijin to the izakaya and gross him out with weird foods"....

Why is this such a popular game in Japan? Most Japanese colleagues I met love this game, but I knew a couple guys who really took it to extremes. It almost made me want to order a 28oz steak for them when they visited the US.

Comment: Re:not where from, where to? (Score 0) 523

Even if we ignored the impossibility to assemble 40 people to do it since everyone who is raiding with the "elite" doesn't give half a poop (unlike when it was new), how exciting do you think it is to start at the bottom? Even if you COULD find people to play, would you WANT to? Would you want to play an 8 year old game and dig your path up for the next 8 years just to be where everyone is today? And then you're 8 years behind AGAIN. Provided the game lasts that long...

Add some spreadsheets, and I think you just described this new ultra-realistic RPG that I've been playing for the last few couple decades. Death is permanent, and it is really difficult to move up and requires a lot of grinding. Plus there are loads of hackers, but only if you know the right 1% of people.

Comment: Re:This is good for Bitcoin (Score 0) 150

by dj245 (#43677861) Attached to: Btcd - a Bitcoind Alternative Written In Go!

Bitcoin has not fluctuated anywhere near 1000% in the past month. At most you could say 530%, comparing the low of 50 on April 16 to the high of 266 on April 10th. And excluding that bubble-and-pop (which very much still happens in USD-denominated assets), the exchange rate has remained relatively stable in the 90-120 range.

There are only a handful of legitimate industries that have a profit margin higher than 10%. Notably real estate, lawyers, healthcare, and defense contractors. If a grocery store had a currency fluctuation of 20% in one month, they would probably be ruined, since they typically run on margins of 1-5%. Price stability is a good thing. Price stability means you know basically what something costs today, and tommorow, and the next day. If you don't know what something costs, how do you conduct transactions? 1% change a month is disastrous (about 12.7% a year!). How any sane person can argue that a 30% shift in exchange rate is "stable" is completely beyond me.

Comment: Re:Yes, spread the false information. (Score 1) 97

Instant access to the web is resulting in a culture shift from making stuff up to looking it up, and Wikipedia is the most important place where people go to do that.

So, yes, even though Wikipedia is a repository of groupthink (and the critics are right that we mustn't forget that), it's groupthink that takes into account the views of a much larger number of contributors, and is much more accurate than the groupthink of a small, isolated group of people.

Unless you are reading a subject which is "owned" by one individual, who furiously defends it against changes they don't agree with. You don't even have to get to an obscure subject to find this, just a non-controversial subject that might not be that much fun to write about for most people. If you come across this, it isn't groupthink- it is just people "making stuff up".

Comment: Re:Teacher should of been ready (Score 1) 215

by dj245 (#43612309) Attached to: Alaskan Middle Schoolers Phish Their Teachers
Nobody cares what you (or anybody else) did in elementary school. I'm sure the teachers work hard, but K-12 is more about making sure someone can be a productive member of society rather than teaching anything in particular. K-12 is a test, just like passing the GED is a test. If you pass it, for the rest of your life you can say with some confidence that you are not a complete failure, no matter how much of a failure you might become.

Comment: Re:Sounds handled fairly well (Score 1) 223

by dj245 (#43609593) Attached to: E-Sports League Stuffed Bitcoin Mining Code Inside Client Software
This is just one more reason why Microsoft needs to provide GPU performance indications in Taskmgr.exe. GPU's used to be somewhat specialty hardware, and only serious gamers, somewhat serious gamers, or professional graphic or CAD users had powerful ones. Nowadays with the new APU-type chips even the cheapest computers can have a reasonably powerful graphics processor.

Comment: Re:Reword (Score 1) 202

by dj245 (#43609489) Attached to: Oslo Needs Your Garbage

Most of the burned garbage is used to feed central heating systems. Same with a lot of other cities in Scandinavia. A few large central furnaces and a big network of hot water pipes.

Not so much to produce electricity. Most of the electricity in Scandinavia is water power or nuclear with a few coal/oil burners that are used for backup in case the current production is insufficient. Add to it a number of windmills but their contribution is small.

There is quite a lot of cogen too. If you are burning the fuel anyway, it makes a lot of sense to use the high-temperature combustion gasses to boil water at high temperature and then run a steam turbine. The steam needed for heating houses, running laundromats, heating businesses, etc is extracted at some point in the turbine.

Why? We can burn a fuel at several thousand degrees F. However, the best pipes we can make can only stand about 1100F (600C) and 3500psi, and these are very expensive and problematic. (For reliability, usually most power plants run at 1000F, 1050F and 2400psi, or sometimes slightly higher). Even at these lower conditions, pipes in the boiler still burst quite frequently (and pipes outside the boiler require wall thickness of several inches). Having high-pressure, high temperature, and high-cost steam pipes running all over town is both prohibitively costly and a safety hazard. So we run the steam turbine, and use cheap piping to houses at much lower pressure and temperature. WE Energies in Milwaukee, for example, tries to run their system between 1 and 200psi, with temperatures near the saturation point.

Comment: Re:Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score 1) 260

by dj245 (#43609095) Attached to: Energy Production Is As 'Dirty' As Ever

If you bothered to RTFA, CO2 emissions was the only metric used in the report. Hence the context.

It is still a misleading and inflammatory statement, both in the article and the summary:

But in a recent speech to the Clean Energy Ministerial, International Energy Agency Executive Director, Maria van der Hoeven, had some bad news: “The drive to clean up the world’s energy system has stalled. Despite much talk by world leaders, and despite a boom of renewable energy over the last decade, the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago.”

SO2, CO, NOx, particulates, mercury, and all the other nasty stuff has been almost eliminated from fossil plant emissions, at least in all first-world countries (US, Canada, Japan, Europe, UK). Most coal plants have clear or near-clear emissions now. This has happened in the last 30 years. CO2 is a problem, but if you burn anything you get CO2. It is an unavoidable product of burning something. Plus power stations are much more efficient nowadays, increasing in efficiency from an average of maybe 40% to 60%+ today. So less fuel is burned per MW, and less CO2 is emitted per MW.

If I had the choice of living in a 1980 energy world or in a 2013 energy world (ignoring all other technological advancements) I would chose 2013 every time. To say that "the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago” is not only misleading, it is wrong. It is propaganda.

Comment: Re:Dumb title: CO2 is not "dirty" (Score 2) 260

by dj245 (#43608927) Attached to: Energy Production Is As 'Dirty' As Ever

The darn thing needs normal ground water to cool.

You cannot cool a nuclear reactor of any significant size with ground water. You need a proper source of water, i.e. large river or the ocean, or you have to use cooling towers. Nuclear reactors are typically less than 1/3 efficient, so for 1GW electrical output you need to get rid of 2GW of heat.

Fukushima was not placed near the ocean just because the engineers loved the view.

Cooling towers use water too. Quite a lot in fact. It is the evaporation of the water that provides the bulk of the cooling effect. If you want a large-scale cooling method that uses no water*, you need to use an air-cooled condenser. There is a good diagram of a cooling tower on this page. An air-cooled condenser is basically a giant car radiator (completely closed system), whereas a cooling tower has water sprays and/or ponds. They can look like the hyperboloid towers, or they can look like large radiators depending on the design. *Some water in air-cooled condensers must be removed as "blowdown" and then made up with fresh water. Otherwise, contaminants would build up in the system. This is both a water and an efficiency loss, so it is usually as low as possible, less than 3% of the flow.

I don't like replying to my own posts, but I forgot to add that air-cooled condensers are avoided as much as possible. They use far less water, but use a lot more power to run the air fans. And the cooling surface must be much larger which also adds cost. And the entire cycle is less efficient with an air-cooled condenser because evaporative cooling can always reach a lower temperature (Carnot-type thermodynamics). In summary, cooling towers use more water per MW, but air-cooled condensers burn more fuel per MW.

If you can get the water permit, cooling towers are the way to go. Recently, I have seen air-cooled condensers becoming more popular for both desert applications and to satisfy permitting concerns.

One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.

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